Archives

Search

Commonplace: Pilgrim’s Inn

Pilgrim’s Inn is beautifully written. It is my first time to read Elizabeth Goudge, but I don’t think it will be the last. Here are some of my favorite moments:

“Her whole salvation depended on a really good nanny. If when one reached exhaustion point, one could say to one’s children, ‘Go to the nursery, darlings,’ Then one could be a good mother, if not, no…At least she couldn’t.”

***

“When one is very tired, the masterful people who tell you what to do can be very restful.”

***

“The desolation in her voice seemed to open a sort of pit at Nadine’s feet. She was shamed. Women like herself, sheltered, indulged, secure, beloved, and yet they dared to find life hard; they dared to pity themselves because the path they trod was strewn with pink rose petals when their own choice would have been crimson.”
(This is a hard quote, but it hit close to home!)

***

“‘Grandmother, said David smiling, ‘I believe you think that if the whole world relied on your judgment the millennium would come.’

‘So it would,’ said Lucilla calmly. ‘I’m not eighty five for nothing. This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority–headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor–ever since it took hold the world’s gone steadily downhill.'”

***

“She knew how worrying, even how agonizing sometimes, the questions of grownups can be to children whose capacity for experience so far outstrips their capacity for talking about it. And in afterlife it’s the other way round, thought Jill; adult and educated folks seemed to experience so little of any consequence and yet to say such a vast and wearisome amount about it.”

***

And, the quote that led me to this book in the first place…

“It was homemaking that mattered. Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and the durableness of each civilization depended upon their quality, and it was no good weakening oneself for the brick-making by thinking too much about the flood.”